Facebook Inc’s penetration rate in Taiwan is higher than in any other Asian market, said Dan Neary, vice president of the social networking giant’s Asia-Pacific marketing team, who arrived in the country on Tuesday.
According to Facebook data released earlier this year, the number of active Facebook users in Taiwan has reached 14 million per month, or about a 60 percent penetration rate, while the number of daily users has hit 10 million.
That figure represents the highest penetration rate in Asia, edging out Hong Kong — with about 58 percent — for the top spot. Facebook’s overall penetration rate in the region at the end of last year was 6.5 percent.
Neary also said that Taiwanese Facebook users have distinctive characteristics.
They are especially fond of sharing gourmet food photos on the site and using the “check in” function that allows users to log the places they have been.
Facebook now has more than 1.1 billion active members worldwide, 800 million of which access the site via smartphones, and user numbers have been growing at an annual rate of 20 percent, Neary said.
The company also has more than 1 million active advertisers worldwide even though it only entered the advertising business three years ago, he said.
Neary attributed the fast growth mainly to Facebook’s requirement that users use their real identities to access its platform, which helps advertisers get a higher response rate and avoid wasting time on non-target users.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by